[PLUG] HELP! Broken Ubuntu! Can't login!

[Vram]

On Sat, 2005-12-10 at 12:10 -0800, John Jordan wrote:
> I was reading on Ubuntu Forums and found a thread about making 
> backups. Someone suggested Kdar. I installed it via Synaptic on 
> my Ubuntu-64 Breezy laptop. I launched it from terminal because it 
> did not create a launch setting under the Applications menu. The 
> Help files were not working, so I fumbled my way through starting a 
> new archive. The archive was to be named 12_10_2005 on my 
> external USB disk, which is formatted ext3.
> 
> It ran for about 50-60 seconds and then locked up Linux. Keyboard 
> and mouse dead. Had to hit the power button. 
> 
> When I restarted I tried again, this time with no other applications 
> running. It seemed to go much better. It progressed to about 150 
> Mb, about 10 minutes running time, then suddenly it disappeared 
> from the screen. I had left the terminal window open and the last 
> line was that it had crashed.
> 
> I wanted to see if it had actually created part of the archive, so I 
> launched Konqueror. This produced an error message that KDE 
> could not run. (I use Gnome for desktop.) I tried a few things, but 
> nothing would get Konqueror to launch. At that point I decided to 
> shut down and restart. I did System > Shut down and it appeared 
> to shut down normally.
> 
> It restarted normally and gave me the usual login screen. But when 
> I entered my username and password it gave me an error message 
> that my profile "is not installed on this computer." I tried several 
> other options under "Session" but the only one that will log me in is 
> "Failsafe Terminal."
> 
> Supposedly, this is a way for me to fix wat is wrong. Unfortunately, 
> I have no clue as to what needs to be fixed or how to do it from a 
> terminal. The terminal window is running in a corner of the screen, 
> and it appears that X is running.
> 
> At this time my computer is essentially dead. The only thing I can 
> think of to do is to wipe the hard disk and reinstall from scratch. 
> Ugh. I do have a backup that I made with Dump a couple days ago. 
> The backup file is intact on the external USB drive -- at least it 
> should be still there, unless that Kdar POS buggered it up 
> somehow. It is a backup from /, so it should be the whole shebang 
> (9+ Gb file). I have no idea how to use it to restore the system, 
> however.
> 
> I'm in deep doo-doo here. :(



Did you make a root account??

Vram